The Blame Game

We always want someone to blame.

When life falls apart—when the diagnosis comes, the market crashes, the relationship ends—we instinctively reach for a name, a face, a cause. Someone must’ve screwed up. Someone had to be asleep at the wheel. Some person, party, policy, system must have created this mess. Because surely it couldn’t have just… happened.

But what if it did?

The floods that ravaged the Texas hill country and took the lives of more than 120 people were an act of God. (Over 150 people are still missing.) Meanwhile in Kerrville, Texas the rain is falling-as the funerals begin across the state.

Sure, there have been floods in the past. Sure, there have been changes to our National Weather Service. And, yes, it would have been ideal to have better early warning systems in place. Hindsight.

In just two hours the river went from a trickle to a flood. The peak flow rate of 185,000 CFS was more than double the flow rate of Niagara Falls per second. One Guadalupe River gauge near Kerrville and Camp Mystic recorded a rise of more than 25 feet in two hours.

But, sometimes in the course of human events tragedies happen. Why? Because life is unpredictable, fragile, and sometimes brutally random.

But, that answer is totally unsatisfactory. It doesn’t give us a villain. It doesn’t let us grab the wheel and steer through life’s difficulties. And so instead, we look for someone or something to blame. A throat to choke, so to speak.

Blame is comforting. It’s orderly. It’s reassuring that life isn’t totally random. And, that can bring about a sense of order in times of chaos.

The Blame Reflex

We want to connect the dots. To quickly surmise that events like this aren’t ordinary. And, that it can’t happen to us. It’s a survival instinct.

But in the real world, that logic backfires. It makes us paranoid, reactive, and obsessed with cause-and-effect clarity where none really exists.

Just take a look at the nutters on X/Twitter claiming that the floods were a government conspiracy. That our government was nefariously cloud seeding, geo-engineering, and manipulating weather in the area.

Never mind that surges of atmospheric moisture from the Pacific Ocean created the “perfect storm”. And, ignore that the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry, which had emerged from the Gulf of Mexico just days earlier. Those systems collided to dump massive amounts of rain on Texas.

But, someone has to be accountable. Particularly in an incredibly secular world. Someone has to be be accountable, even when the situation isn’t. And so we outsource blame, because uncertainty is untenable.

When Faith Isn’t There

I’ve noticed this especially in people who don’t have a faith life, or any spiritual framework to lean on. When the hard stuff hits—and it always does—they start scanning the room for someone to hold responsible.

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Someone has to be behind the curtain. Because if no one is in charge, then the world really is as fragile and uncertain as it feels.

And that’s terrifying.

Blame gives people the illusion of power in an uncontrollable world. It lets them shake their fist instead of sit with their grief. It feels like doing something.

It’s simply easier to be angry than sad. But mostly, that anger is just a placeholder for a story they haven’t made peace with yet.

Sometimes, It’s Just Life

But here’s the hard truth: sometimes no one’s to blame.

Sometimes your spouse leaves because they were broken long before they met you.

Sometimes the cancer comes because cells mutate for no reason.

Sometimes the market tanks, the job disappears, or the storm hits your house instead of your neighbor’s, and there’s no secret meaning or sinister force behind it.

It just… happens.

It’s called being alive.

Life is unscripted. Unfair. Uncoordinated. And often, unbelievably out of our control. That doesn’t make it meaningless. But it does make it messy.

And while blaming someone might make you feel temporarily powerful, it doesn’t actually help you heal.

The Cost of Blame

Blame is like sugar for the soul. It gives you a short burst of energy but it wears off quickly. Blame keeps you locked in place, rehashing your pain instead of metabolizing it.

Blame keeps relationships small. It turns disagreements into wars. It makes politics a zero-sum bloodsport. It reduces human beings to avatars of whatever idea or ideology we’ve attached to them.

But most damaging of all: blame keeps us from humility. From saying, “I don’t know.” From sitting with loss, or randomness, or mystery without needing to tidy it up with a neat, furious explanation.

The more we try to control life through blame, the more it controls us. Our peace becomes hostage to our narrative. Our joy becomes conditional on justice. And justice, as the world keeps showing us, rarely arrives on time.

Instead we should surrender. To realize we are t in control of anything. You don’t have to believe in God to see the value in surrender.

Faith does give people a place to bring their confusion, their suffering, their unanswered questions. It creates space for mystery. For not-knowing. For trust.

They can say, “This hurts—and I may never know why. That’s not weakness. That’s wisdom.

Letting Go of the Wheel

We spend so much of our lives trying to be in charge—curating our feeds, optimizing our calendars, managing our reputations, upgrading our apps.

And then life reminds us: you’re not in control. You never were.

You can either spend your life blaming other people for things outside of our control. Or, you can grieve the loss without assigning a villain. You can sit with the mess without sweeping it into a tidy box. You can surrender—not as a form of giving up, but as a way of letting go.

Letting go of the illusion that everything has to make sense. That every storm has a cause. That every life event needs a culprit.

Sometimes, the healthiest thing you can do is stop pointing fingers and start opening your hands. To grace. To grief. And, to the wild, unpredictable flow of life.

How are you working through this terrible tragedy? I want to hear from you. Just click the box below and let’s chat about it.

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